


A Beast in the Woods

by ChrisCalledMeSweetie



Series: Spooky Johnlock Stories [10]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Another Twist, Edwardian era, M/M, One More Twist for Good Measure, Teenlock, This story is not straight in any sense of the word, a twist, or maybe not, possible werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-23 19:54:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21086906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChrisCalledMeSweetie/pseuds/ChrisCalledMeSweetie
Summary: There's something uncanny about the young man Sherlock discovers lying naked in the woods of his parents' estate...





	A Beast in the Woods

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Vulpesmellifera](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vulpesmellifera/gifts).

> Adapted from Saki’s short story Gabriel-Ernest — with a very different ending.

"There is a wild beast in our woods," said Mycroft, as he finished packing to return to University. It was the only remark he had made during the process, but as Sherlock had been talking incessantly, his brother's silence had not been noticeable.

"A stray fox or two and some resident weasels. Nothing more formidable," said Sherlock. 

His brother said nothing.

"What did you mean about a wild beast?" asked Sherlock later, when Mycroft was about to leave for the station.

"Nothing. My imagination. I mustn’t miss the train," said Mycroft.

That afternoon Sherlock went for one of his frequent rambles through the woodland property where he lived with his parents. It was his custom to take mental notes of everything he saw during his walks, for the purpose of assisting contemporary science. 

What Sherlock saw on this particular afternoon was, however, something far removed from his ordinary range of experience. On a shelf of smooth stone overhanging the far side of a deep pool in the hollow of an oak coppice, a young man of about Sherlock’s age — perhaps a year older — lay asprawl, drying his wet limbs luxuriously in the sun. His golden hair, parted by a recent dive, lay close to his head, and his multi-hued eyes were turned towards Sherlock with a certain lazy watchfulness. 

It was an unexpected apparition, and Sherlock found himself in the novel situation of not immediately understanding exactly what he observed. Where on earth could this naked, wild-looking young man hail from? It was impossible to deduce.

"What are you doing there?" Sherlock demanded.

"Sunning myself," replied the young man.

"Where do you live?"

"Here, in these woods."

"You can't live in these woods," said Sherlock. "This is my family’s estate."

"Your family has very nice woods," said the young man, with a touch of humour in his voice.

"But where do you sleep at night?"

"I don't sleep at night; that's my busiest time."

Sherlock began to have an irritated feeling that he was grappling with a problem that was eluding him.

"What do you eat?" he asked.

"Flesh," said the young man, and he pronounced the word with slow relish, as though he were tasting it.

"Flesh! What flesh?"

"Since it interests you: rabbits, wild-fowl, hares, poultry, lambs in their season, children when I can get any — they're usually too well locked in at night, when I do most of my hunting. It's quite two months since I tasted child-flesh."

Ignoring the teasing nature of that last remark, Sherlock tried to draw out the young man on the subject of possible poaching operations. "Our hillside hares aren't easily caught."

"At night I hunt on four feet," was the somewhat cryptic response.

"I suppose you mean that you hunt with a dog?" hazarded Sherlock.

The young man rolled slowly over onto his back, and laughed a weird low laugh, that was pleasantly like a chuckle and disagreeably like a snarl. "I don't fancy any dog would be very anxious for my company, especially at night."

Sherlock began to feel that there was something positively uncanny about the strange-eyed, strange-tongued young man.

"You can’t stay in these woods," he declared authoritatively.

"I fancy you'd rather have me here than in your house," said the young man.

The prospect of this wild, nude young man in his parents’ primly ordered house was certainly an alarming one. 

"If you don't go, I shall have to make you," said Sherlock.

The young man turned like a flash, plunged into the pool, and in a moment had flung his wet and glistening body half-way up the bank where Sherlock was standing. In an otter the movement would not have been remarkable; in this young man Sherlock found it sufficiently startling. His foot slipped as he made an involuntarily backward movement, and he found himself almost prostrate on the slippery, weed-grown bank, with those unsettling eyes not very far from his own. Almost instinctively he half raised his hand to his throat. 

The young man laughed again, a laugh in which the snarl had nearly driven out the chuckle, and then, with another of his astonishing lightning movements, plunged out of view into a yielding tangle of weed and fern.

"What an extraordinary wild animal!" said Sherlock as he picked himself up. And then he recalled Mycroft's remark: "There is a wild beast in our woods."

Walking slowly homeward, Sherlock began to turn over in his mind various local occurrences which might be traceable to the existence of this astonishing young man.

Something had been thinning the game in the woods lately, poultry had been missing from the farms, hares were growing unaccountably scarcer, and complaints had reached him of lambs being carried off bodily from the hills. Was it possible that this wild young man was really hunting the countryside in company with some clever poacher dogs? He had spoken of hunting "four-footed" by night, but then again, he had hinted strangely at no dog caring to come near him, "especially at night." It was certainly puzzling. 

And then, as Sherlock ran his mind over the various depredations that had been committed during the last month or two, he came suddenly to a dead stop, alike in his walk and his speculations. The child missing from the mill two months ago — the accepted theory was that he had tumbled into the mill-race and been swept away; but the boy’s mother had always declared she had heard a shriek on the hill side of the house, in the opposite direction from the water. It was unthinkable, of course, but Sherlock wished that the young man had not made that disturbing remark about child-flesh eaten two months ago. Such dreadful things should not be said even in jest.

Sherlock, contrary to his usual wont, did not feel disposed to be communicative about his discovery in the wood. At dinner that night he was quite unusually silent.

"Where's your voice gone to?" asked Mummy. "One would think you had seen a wolf."

Sherlock, who was not familiar with that old saying, thought the remark rather foolish; if he HAD seen a wolf on their property his tongue would have been extraordinarily busy with the subject.

At breakfast the next morning Sherlock was conscious that his feeling of uneasiness regarding yesterday's episode had not wholly disappeared, and he resolved to contact Mycroft, and learn from him what he had really seen that had prompted the remark about a wild beast in the woods. With this resolution taken, he hummed a bright little melody as he sauntered to the sitting-room. As he entered the room the melody made way abruptly for a pious invocation. Gracefully asprawl on the ottoman, in an attitude of almost exaggerated repose, was the young man of the woods. He was drier than when Sherlock had last seen him, but no other alteration was noticeable.

"How dare you come here?" asked Sherlock furiously.

"You told me I was not to stay in the woods," said the young man calmly.

"But not to come here. Supposing my mother should see you!"

With a view to minimising that catastrophe, Sherlock hastily obscured as much of his unwelcome guest as possible under the folds of a Morning Post. At that moment his mother entered the room.

"This is a poor young man who has lost his way — and lost his memory. He doesn't know who he is or where he comes from," explained Sherlock desperately, glancing apprehensively at their guest's face to see whether he was going to add inconvenient candour to his other savage propensities.

Mrs. Holmes was enormously interested.

"Perhaps his underlinen is marked," she suggested.

"He seems to have lost that, too," said Sherlock, making frantic little grabs at the Morning Post to keep it in its place.

A homeless youth appealed to Mrs. Holmes as warmly as a stray kitten or derelict puppy would have done.

"We must do all we can for him," she decided, and in a very short time a servant, dispatched to the rectory, had returned with a suit of undergarments, and the necessary accessories of shirt, trousers, shoes, etc. Clothed, clean, and groomed, the young man lost none of his uncanniness in Sherlock's eyes, but his mother found him sweet.

"We must call him something till we know who he really is," she said. "John, I think; that is a nice suitable name."

Sherlock agreed, but he privately doubted whether it was being grafted onto a nice suitable young man. His misgivings were not diminished by the fact that their staid and elderly spaniel had bolted out of the house at the first incoming of the stranger, and now obstinately remained shivering and yapping at the farther end of the orchard, while the canary, usually as vocally industrious as Sherlock himself, had put itself on an allowance of frightened cheeps. 

More than ever Sherlock was resolved to consult Mycroft without loss of time. A letter would be too slow, and a telegram lacked privacy. He would have to catch the train to Oxford to speak with his brother directly.

As he slipped out of the house for the long walk to the station, his mother was arranging that John should help her to entertain the children of her Sunday-school class at tea that afternoon.

When Sherlock reached his destination, Mycroft was not at first disposed to be communicative. 

"I am averse to dwelling on anything of an impossibly fantastic nature that I may see or think that I have seen," he said, with a maddening calmness.

"But what DID you see?" persisted Sherlock.

"What I thought I saw was something so extraordinary that no really sane man could dignify it with the credit of having actually happened." 

"Tell me!" Sherlock pleaded.

Mycroft relented. "I was standing, the last evening I was at home, half-hidden in the hedgerow by the orchard gate, watching the dying glow of the sunset. Suddenly I became aware of a naked young man, a bather from some neighbouring pool, I took him to be, who was standing out on the bare hillside also watching the sunset. But just then the sun dipped out of view, and all the orange and pink slid out of the landscape, leaving it cold and grey. And at the same moment an astounding thing happened — the young man vanished too!"

"What! Vanished away into nothing?" asked Sherlock excitedly.

"No; that is the dreadful part of it," answered his brother. "On the open hillside where the young man had been standing a second ago, stood a large wolf, tawny in colour, with gleaming fangs and strange, glowing eyes. You may think—"

But Sherlock did not stop for anything as futile as thought. Already he was tearing at top speed towards the station. He dismissed the idea of a telegram. "JOHN IS A WEREWOLF" was a hopelessly inadequate effort at conveying the situation, and Mummy would think it was a coded message to which he had omitted to give her the key. His one hope was that he might reach home before sundown. 

The cab which he hailed at the other end of the railway journey bore him with what seemed exasperating slowness along the country roads, which were pink and mauve with the flush of the sinking sun. His mother was putting away some unfinished jams and cake when he arrived.

"Where is John?" Sherlock almost screamed.

"He is taking little Henry Knight home," said Mummy. "It was getting so late, I thought it wasn't safe to let the child go back alone. What a lovely sunset, isn't it?"

But Sherlock, although not oblivious to the glow in the western sky, did not stay to discuss its beauties. He raced out the door and along the narrow lane that led to the home of the Knights. A dwindling rim of red sun showed still on the skyline, and the next turning must bring him in view of the ill-assorted pair he was pursuing. Then the colour went suddenly out of things, and a grey light settled itself with a quick shiver over the landscape. 

Sherlock rounded the bend to find neither what he’d most hoped nor what he’d most feared. Neither Henry Knight nor John was anywhere in sight. Instead, the latter’s borrowed clothes lay discarded in a heap on the otherwise empty path.

Heart in his throat, Sherlock dashed the rest of the way to the Knights’ home and pounded on the door. It was opened by a smiling Mrs. Knight.

"Sherlock, dear—" she began, but Sherlock cut her off.

"Henry!" he panted. "Where’s Henry? Is he here?" 

"Oh, he arrived home about a quarter of an hour ago, accompanied by that nice young man your mother’s taken in. I suppose he forgot something at your house again, and you’ve come to return it. That child would forget his head, if it wasn’t sewn on tight. I’m sorry to put you to the trouble of coming all the way here — you seem quite out of breath."

Relieved, Sherlock did his best to account for his unexpected visit. "No, no, it’s no trouble. And Henry didn’t leave anything behind. I only wanted to make sure he arrived home safely, since I wasn’t sure John knew the way."

Mrs. Knight laughed. "Well, my Henry may be a bit scatterbrained, but he does know his own way home. Still, it was thoughtful of your mother to send an escort with him."

Sherlock took his leave, and headed slowly back to his own home. He paused along the way to collect the garments John had left on the ground. Of John himself there was no sign. 

The following morning, however, Sherlock woke to find John’s strange, heterochromatic eyes watching him intently from the corner of his bedroom. 

"What are you doing in my room?" he demanded.

"Watching you sleep."

"Obviously. But why are you here?"

"You fascinate me."

This gave Sherlock pause. He had to admit to himself that John fascinated him, as well.

"Where did you disappear to last night?" Sherlock asked.

"The woods. I cannot bear to be within doors once the sun has set."

"And yet here you are, now."

"Yes. The sun is up, and here I am."

"Well, if you mean to stay, you’d better get dressed," Sherlock said, rising from his bed and gathering up the clothes he’d retrieved from the lane the previous evening. He held them out to John, but the strange young man made no move to take the proffered garments. 

"Put these on," Sherlock instructed, waving the clothes at his guest. 

"I’m not in the habit of wearing such things."

"You wore them yesterday," Sherlock pointed out. "And you’ll have to wear them again. My mother is very particular about proper attire at the breakfast table, and I’ve learned the hard way that there’s no sense in arguing with her about it."

"If you insist. But I’ll need your help. One of the servants dressed me yesterday. I don’t think I could manage on my own."

Sherlock stared at John, trying to make sense of all the disparate pieces of information he’d so far gleaned about this odd young man. That he could have reached the age of sixteen or seventeen without having learned to dress himself seemed absurd. Had he been raised by wolves? Sherlock had read of such cases, but those feral children had been unable to speak. Though the words John spoke were strange, he was perfectly adept at using the English language, and his mental capacity did not appear to be impaired. So what could account for his peculiarity? Sherlock’s mind, usually so quick to make deductions, was failing him spectacularly in this case.

Putting the larger questions aside, Sherlock turned his attention to the more pressing matter at hand. John was naked, and that would not do. If he was incapable of dressing himself, Sherlock would have to assist him.

Thus resolved, Sherlock helped John into the borrowed clothes, touching him as little as possible, and determinedly refusing to acknowledge the awkwardness of the situation. For his part, John remained disconcertingly passive. Of course, everything about him was disconcerting to Sherlock, but his passivity seemed somehow out of character.

Once they were both properly attired, Sherlock led John down to breakfast. Mrs. Holmes greeted them warmly.

"I hope you slept well," she said, once they were seated at the breakfast table.

Sherlock, mouth already full of eggs, nodded, humming affirmatively.

John replied, "I spent a most pleasant night."

Sherlock shot him a curious look, but said nothing.

"I’m so glad," said Mrs. Holmes. Then, turning to Sherlock, she added, "Remember, dear, I’ll be leaving this morning to join your father in London for a few days. Can I trust you to stay out of trouble while I’m away?"

"Yes, Mummy."

"And make sure John has everything he needs."

"Yes, Mummy."

"And keep him entertained."

"Yes, Mummy."

"Very well. I’d better go pack."

Sherlock watched his mother out of the room, then turned his attention to John. "What would you like to do today?"

"I am always most at home out of doors."

Sherlock, who felt much the same, readily agreed to spend the entire day exploring the Holmes family’s vast estate. The two young men wandered about companionably through woods and meadows, over hills and along valley streams. It was nearly dusk by the time their ramblings brought them to the place where they had first met.

Without warning, John reached out his hands and unfastened the top button of Sherlock’s shirt.

"What are you doing?" Sherlock asked in alarm.

"Taking off your clothes."

"Why?"

"The better to see you."

Sherlock blinked rapidly, as if he himself were attempting to see John better in the fading light. The blinking didn’t help.

John gave him a wolfish look. "I allowed you to dress me this morning, though it’s completely against my nature. It seems only fair that you should allow me to undress you this evening."

If there was a fault in this logic, Sherlock was unable to muster his powers of thought enough to find it. He stood, trembling, in mute compliance, while John — with unexpected skill — divested him of his clothing. 

As John’s fingertips brushed his bare skin, the hair at Sherlock’s nape began to rise. And something else began to rise, lower down.

John dropped gracefully to his knees and looked up at Sherlock hungrily. "May I feast upon your flesh?"

Unable to speak, Sherlock only nodded.

…

Mrs. Holmes returned from London three days later to find no sign of her recent houseguest, nor of her younger son. Knowing Sherlock’s propensity for rambling, she was not, at first, unduly alarmed. When night fell and he still had not appeared, however, she sent out a search party. Try as they might, though, no one was ever able to find hide nor hair of Sherlock or John. 

The next time Mycroft returned home from University, however, he caught a fleeting glimpse of two beasts in the woods.

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this adaptation of one of Saki's classic short stories, please check out the other works in my [Sackful of Saki](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1492898) series. They're all more on the humorous side, and mostly Johnlock, with one Mystrade. Or, if you're in the mood for more chilling and thrilling tales, please check out the rest of my [Spooky Johnlock Stories](https://archiveofourown.org/series/560890). There's something for everyone - from G-rated fluff to explicitly smutty horror, and everything in between. 
> 
> Kind comments and kudos make me smile.


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